For decades, a fossil skull discovered in Piltdown, England, was hailed as the
missing link between apes and humans. Entire careers were built on its
authenticity. Then in 1953, the awful truth came out: "Piltdown Man" was a
fake! But who done it? In "The Boldest Hoax," NOVA gets to the bottom of the
greatest scientific hoodwinking of all time.

The search for clues takes NOVA to the archives of Britain's august Natural
History Museum in London, where intriguing documents shed new light on the
notorious case. Offering theories on the deception are two prominent
paleontologists at the museum, Chris Stringer and Andy Currant. Also sleuthing
for NOVA are archeologist Miles Russell of Britain's Bournemouth University,
historian Richard Milner of the American Museum of Natural History in New York,
and Giles Oakley, son of Kenneth Oakley, the scientist who blew the whistle on
the hoax in 1953.

It all started in the early 1900s, when a laborer digging near the village of
Piltdown in southern England reportedly found a strange piece of skull that he
passed on to Charles Dawson, a local amateur archeologist. Dawson obtained more
fossils from the site and, believing they were the remains of a very ancient
human, approached Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the Natural
History Museum. In December 1912, the two jointly presented the reconstructed
skull to the public as humankind's earliest ancestor.

"Piltdown Man was a really big deal in 1912, because it was a time when very
little was known of human fossil remains," says historian Richard Milner. "It
was perceived to be the missing link, the fossil that connected humans with
apes." Notably, Piltdown Man was even more spectacular than the celebrated
human fossils already discovered on the European continent, such as Neanderthal
Man in Germany.

More remains turned up in Piltdown through 1915, the year before Dawson's
death. These included a second partial skull and a strange bone artifact
resembling a cricket bat—a fishy find that looked suspiciously like a
hoax but was accepted by Woodward as an ancient implement. Forty years later,
new scientific tests showed that Piltdown Man was a forgery, concocted in part
from what was probably an orangutan's jaw. Suspicion immediately fell on
Dawson, but there were other candidates.

Some scholars believe that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock
Holmes stories, was the mastermind. Conan Doyle had a motive: desire for
revenge against the British scientific establishment for ridiculing his
spiritualist research. He also had the opportunity, since he lived just a few
miles from Piltdown and frequently played golf nearby. Others think that
Woodward was the instigator or at least Dawson's collaborator, since the
fossils were faked with far greater skill than any amateur presumably
possessed.

In recent years, another suspect has emerged: Martin Hinton, a staff member at
the Natural History Museum who had the motive, means, opportunity, and
personality to perpetrate an expert scientific fraud. Plus he left several
suggestive hints. On the other hand, the evidence against Hinton can be read in
more than one way, and the real swindler may be the obvious one: the man who
had the most to gain from convincing the world that Piltdown Man was the fossil
to end all fossils—Charles Dawson.

Piltdown Man, here shown in a model, was the greatest scientific fraud in history. How could the scientific community have been fooled for so long (from 1912 when the pieces of skull were "found" to 1953 when the hoax was exposed)? Hear from Evan Hadingham, NOVA's Senior Science Editor and a trained archeologist, in our podcast.